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California's Santa Clara County Bans Happy Meal Toys
WrongSizeGlass writes "The L.A. Times is reporting that Santa Clara County officials have voted to ban toys and other promotions that restaurants offer with high-calorie children's meals. 'This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure. 'This ordinance breaks the link between unhealthy food and prizes.' Supervisor Donald Gage, who voted against the measure, said, 'If you can't control a 3-year-old child for a toy, God save you when they get to be teenagers.' The vote was 3 - 2 in favor of the ban."
California may as well be a whole 'nother country.
I know, let's not bother with that thing known as personal responsibility, let's legislate EVERYTHING!
Hey parents, your kids wouldn't be so fat if you didn't feed them crap food and let them sit on their butts in front of the t.v. all day and night.
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...they ban the toys, but keep the crap food? Don't get me wrong, I think it's the responsability of parents to keep track of what their kids ingest, not the governement's...but I still can't help but be reminded of our good friend George Carlin:
"...now they're banning toy guns, AND THEY'RE GONNA KEEP THE FUCKIN' REAL ONES!"
Living With a Nerd
And Christmas while they're at it. Dumbasses. This stupidity will not likely have any negative repercussions, aside from McDonalds franchises in the area having to come up with procedures to de-toy their happy meals. But what I suspect will happen is that the kids won't really want the happy meal without the toy, so the parent will take the cheaper route and get them a burger and fries from the dollar menu. With more calories than what they would have gotten in the happy meal. And no toy.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
If we can't bribe our children to eat poison, the terrorists have won!
What the article says:
"This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys" to sell high-calorie, unhealthful food, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure.
What the summary says:
'This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful toys, said Supervisor Ken Yeager, who sponsored the measure.
Queue up the Dr. Ferris speech about the real purpose of the law.
Controlling people. Not even for their own good, but merely for the sake of weilding control.
That is politics in America today.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
...this is a great idea. I had to institute a rule in my house that no toys were allowed with food. I found that when I forbid the kids from having the toys, when I gave them a choice of restaurants for dinner, they were much more likely to chose one with better food. It seems that the toys were a large part of the draw...take that away, and they were much more likely to eat something healthy.
While this may work from a pure operant conditioning standpoint, but they fail to realize the problem. THE PARENTS. The kid screams and moans for McDonalds, so the give him McDonalds. The fatty foods lipids are the real addictive, so once hooked, Micky D's has got their childish love. It is the parents that are the problem. Who is the government to say that a piece of plastic in a bag can't be given away with a meal? Its the damn bad parents that allow their lardsacks children to accumulate mass that should be punished. So now when little Johnny screams for a happy meal and a toy, what are the parents going to do, "sorry johnny, but the county officials have made it illegal, no toys for you". So instead they still go get the happy meal (since there aren't any ramifications for that, yet) and then just buy the kid a damn toy elsewhere, completely sidestepping the actual problem.
And California wonders why their state is ready to self-implode. Treating the symptoms, not the problems. And really, is this a problem? If the parents choose to give their kids fast food, then its their choice! GTFOML. But there are a 1000 better things they could do with the taxpayers time to curb obesity other than just straight banning stuff. Reminds me of the salt ban that could be coming.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I really HATE the fact that people actually believe that it's OK to mandate things as long as they or their proxy's are in charge.
First, let me say this. I'm totally on board with Jamie Oliver, love what the guy is trying to do, etc etc. I think his "revolution" show is only vaguely based on the reality of the people he's covering, but he's gotta sell ads for his network so he can keep buying food for his family, and it doesn't detract from the good that such a revolution could do.
Having said all that... Here's a tip: If the kid never learns that McDonald's meals come with toys, the toys cannot be used to sell the food.
But the shitty plastic toys are as bad for brain development as the shitty fatty food is for body development. And the shitty mind pablum TV that the shitty food and the shitty toys are advertised on is even worse.
Stay away from the King, the Clown, and the young girl with the red pigtails. There is absolutely nothing inside those four walls that your kid needs, or that is in any way good for your kid.
We don't need laws against using plastic crap to sell crap food. We need to make good healthy food as affordable as crap food, and show people how easy it is to feed it to their kids. We need to get rid of the plastic crap and go back to durable toys that last and foster imagination and free play. We don't need our congresscritters to pass "Save the Children" laws to do this for us, because those almost always backfire.
(Example from the show: like making Jamie take his pasta-and-vegetables off the food line because it didn't have enough vegetables, then stating that french fries DO count as a full vegetable when it was replaced with prepared crap).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
The San Jose Mercury News (warning: pop-under ad) has more details. The ordinance does not ban Happy Meal toys per se, but rather bans toys distributed with meals that exceed nutritional limits (485 Calories, 600 mg sodium). Furthermore, it only applies to unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County. (There are no McDonald's locations in unincorporated areas of Santa Clara County.)
This seems like a good idea to me. Obviously, fast food restaurants give toys away only as a perverse incentive to attract kids. This ordinance, while largely symbolic, nullifies that marketing ploy. You want a toy? You can only get it if you forego the soda and the salt on the fries.
When I used to get my Happy Meal as a child, I was more entertained by the toy than my food. I began to have weight problems as I grew older because I saw food as an event, a fun thing, a highlight of my day, instead of something to keep me fueled. High calorie foods aren't healthy, but they don't cause fat kids. Children with normal, healthy eating habits will take two bites of their burger and then run along to play with their new toy. When parents use food as a reward ("You did good on your report card, lets order pizza!") you have a problem. When I got to my mid to later teens, most of my friends had normal eating habits -- they didn't get excited by food like me. I picked up on that, and changed my eating habits to view food as fuel, not fun. It took about three years, but I've lost over 50 pounds and have a proper build complete with muscle tone. Bottom line: unhealthy food itself isn't the problem, it's how we view food in our daily lives. If you snack to pass the time, even when you're not hungry, if you go back for seconds after your pains are gone, you have unhealthy eating habits. Eat to live, don't live to eat. It's a habit our culture in America breeds -- food for fun. Unhealthy food isn't the root cause though (even if it contributes.)
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
I'm completely for this. I see no difference between this and "Joe Camel", I hope this becomes a trend across the nation.
I was recently at a drive through, looking at the (empty) playground of a local Burger King. I thought how terrible it is that these fast food companies have tried to attract children to their unhealthy foods. Playgrounds, playful characters such as Ronald McDonald, Grimace, and the Hamburglar, happy meals, and movies such as Mac & Me, really show how terribly affected my generation was by this advertising. I remember wanting to go to McDonalds as a child so I could see a cloud and receive a toy. I highly suspect that these companies only scaled back their tactics as a defensive tactic after seeing how the cigarette companies were treated.
Yes, we can argue that parents should be more responsible, but parents cannot shield their children completely from outside influences, while -- to a certain extent -- government can. Parents were generally not giving their children cigarettes, but Camel advertising was shown to have produced an effect on children. Fast food restaurants giving "educational field trips" to elementary schools, as I recall from my own childhood, wasn't an altruistic act of these companies, they were in it for the long-tail. Lets not get started on birthday parties... These companies have been worse than the cigarette companies, showing no shame in their actions. As far as I know, I might be wrong, Camel never gave away children's toys, provided playgrounds, gave tours as elementry-school field-trips, nor had "Joe Camel" themed birthday parties. I doubt Camel ever had a man dress up as Joe Camel, blowing balloons (or smoke rings!) at birthday parties.